- Spend five to ten hours per week on their Digital Entrepreneurship Certificate across the duration of the programme
- Work in teams of three to five students coming from different academic backgrounds
- Follow a design-thinking approach that will lead them towards innovative solutions with the support of Forward faculty
Certificates
Digital entrepreneurship
The Digital Entrepreneurship Certificate runs in parallel to the academic programme and is designed for students who wish to venture into creating a digital solution from scratch. The course aims at equiping students with the critical thinking and decision making tools to implement projects that positively impact the world around them, by solving an actual pain point for their users or ecosystems. This solution may be social – or business-oriented depending on your aspirations.
Expectations and
benefits
- The impact of their project based on a rigorous assessment and their engagement in the process
- Their journey: how they make sense of the different steps they went through, including the failed attempts that are part of the learning process
- Their skills development
- A concrete experience to share with future recruiters
- First hand understanding of no-code development, UX design or digital marketing
- Basic research skills
- A set of core entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Certificate structure
Get up to speed: the Forward Bootcamp will introduce you to the core concepts, technologies, methodologies, and tools of digital solutions development.
Specialise: the Forward modular programme will allow you to specialise in one specific area such as coding, social networking, web development, or data. You will follow them across the certificate duration in parallel with your project development.
The design of the programme is based on five steps that echo the approach to real-world problem-solving of social issues:
Start your project
- Team set-up: collaborate with two to three of your peers based on a shared idea, define your team rules, then refine the problem you wish to solve
- Envision & create: explore your driving values and intentions, and strengthen your creativity to solve real life challenges
- Strategise: define your target group, refine your value proposition, and analyse competition
- Design your MVP: define your basic functionalities and implement them in a prototype
- Optimise: launch the agile improvement cycle: evaluate gaps, enrich your functionalities, plan and prioritise, design, implement, review, and monitor to identify gaps
Teaching & learning activities
In addition to these assignment cycles, students will:
Attend an introductory bootcamp to learn about the nature, applications, and implications of AI and machine learning, big data, internet of things, webmarketing, and cyber security. They will all practice the basics of coding and web development
Attend a specialisation learning session in the subset of digital skills of your choice:
- No-Code: Build an app using the no-code process development and become familiar with web development & coding
- Web development: Code in HTML5 and CSS3 Create interactive web experiences with JavaScript
- Digital design: basics of UX, graphic design, data visualisation, digital design techniques
- Social networking & content: understanding Social media algorithms, Core concepts and applications of digital marketing, multi channel approaches, data analysis for marketing
- Data: Data analysis process and tools, coding data analysis with Python
Creating a digital solution
Each step of this process is divided into assignments ranging from a one week- to eight-week duration. Each assignment (for example: “perform a benchmark of existing solutions”) follows the same sequence:
- Students are expected to explore the learning material communicated by the faculty corresponding to the assignment (what is a benchmark, how to perform a benchmark, how to present a benchmark)
- Students attend one (or a couple of) small group workshop(s) with their trainer to discuss how to implement the tools, methods, and concepts from the learning material for their own project
- Each team shares with its trainer a workplan to complete the assignment (milestones, task definition and organisation)
- Each team implements its plan while adjusting to circumstances with the support of the trainer
- The assignment is completed by a team debriefing session with the trainer to check advancement, bring corrective measures, and reflect on progress and challenges
Discover our students’ projects:
This platform is designed to gather all events happening at CIUP – users will be able to access event information and create new events as well.
This tool is designed to support people in emergency situations through an app with good practice guides with common problems such as burns, sprains, and fainting.
This project aims to help CIUP residents find sports buddies through an online matching tool that also sorts partners according to their level, sports, age, and more.
